I. Field
The present invention relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for scheduling transmissions in a wireless network.
II. Background
Wireless networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as voice, packet data, and so on. These networks may be capable of supporting communication for multiple users by sharing the available system resources. Examples of such networks include a wireless local area network (WLAN), a wireless personal area network (WPAN), a wireless wide area network (WWAN), a code division multiple access (CDMA) network, a time division multiple access (TDMA) network, a frequency division multiple access (FDMA) network, and so on. The terms “network” and “system” are often used interchangeably.
A wireless network may include any number of access points and any number of user terminals. An access point is typically a gateway or a bridge between the wireless network and a backbone, which may be a wireline network. A user terminal is a device that can communicate with an access point and/or another user terminal. Each user terminal may be actively communicating with an access point or may be idle at any given moment. The active user terminals may have different data requirements and capabilities, and the idle user terminals may likewise have different capabilities. The wireless network may implement a specific transmission structure, support one or more transmission schemes, and so on. A key challenge is then to select and schedule user terminals for transmission and to allocate the available system resources to the selected user terminals as efficiently as possible based on their requirements and capabilities. This task is more challenging in a high throughput wireless network where scheduling has greater impact on the overall performance of the wireless network.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to efficiently schedule transmission in a wireless network.